Dear Faith Family,
Our family enjoys Disney World; that's no secret. Due largely to Deedra's savvy planning, we have had several opportunities to spend time as a family immersed in a world of stories and thrill rides. Inevitably, we find ourselves wandering the park waiting for our next adventure but needing some cool place to slow down, and that's when we make our way to Walt's Carousel of Progress.
The "ride" is a slowly rotating theater with audio-animatronics on the stage showing a family's "progress" from the first days of electricity into the future of a technological utopia. The attraction was the central feature of the 1964 New York World's Fair, and while its tech is dated (and its song annoyingly sticky!), the vision for humanity it foretells is sadly accurate. In Walt's eyes, humanity is advanced the further it is removed from the daily tasks of living. The more machines can do for us, the less we have to do for ourselves. And the assumption in the "progressing" theater is the better we are for it all.
What Walt saw way back then is what most of the modern, especially our Western world, has arrived at. Like Disney's carousel, we go around and around under the assumption that what makes life better is working less, rather than good work done well.
Maybe because in the cultivation of life, all those responsibilities, roles, and relationships which require our daily efforts are entangled with thistles and thorns, we wrestle to work less. Maybe because leisure is marketed as a luxury and luxury is for the elite, we long for less labor. Maybe because we don't see the value of our daily efforts, unable to imagine our daily grinding as a part of something more than surviving; we save our hearts for something else. Maybe because we don't rhythmically cease striving for life with God, we strive for the god-like disconnection from the efforts to live (though admittedly, that is unlike the God we know in Jesus).
Contrary to Walt and our cultural perception and (if we're honest) our feelings toward it, work, as we said on Sunday, is not something that we overcome, but the means for overcoming, the way of living with God in partnership with His good design and destiny. Work is cultivating good in life that God has made, and doing so amid the seeming chaos that surrounds (see Gen. 2:5-15). If work was anything less, could the apostle Paul, with integrity to his calling as 'a servant of Christ Jesus...set apart for the gospel of God,' say to wives and husbands, children and parents, slaves and masters,
Whatever you do, work from the soul as for the Lord and not for mankind, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ.
(Colossians 3:23-24)
Our goal is not to get through work, get out of work, or work less, but to experience the wholeness of being (re)made to work in Jesus. And doing that for which we are fashioned, well, from the essence of our being. To that end, I invite you to pray an adaption of our Collective Prayer this week with me (and for one another).
Father, help us live into the gift of your beautiful, never-ending grace.
Holy Spirit, help us see that in you we are enough,
formed and fashioned in your good design for your good destiny.
Wonderful is your work; may our souls know it very well!May our work be a beautiful, generous offering of love to you, Father.
May it spill over to the people and the world you made.
May we flourish in our work,
because we are always resting
in the finished work of Jesus and His ever-presence.
Amen.
Love you, faith family! God bless.